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Warhammer 40K Space Marine

I wasn't too thrilled by the demo way back when I played it, but TotalBiscuit gushing over the game in his WTF video convinced me to pick it up nontheless when it was(and still is) on sale on Steam. Played through most of the first 2 parts and enjoying it so far.

Here are some screenshots:

The shooting action is visceral and fun.

The melee action might not exactly be Batman:AC but it works well enough and it looks great.

The controls and the movement feel right on kb+mouse.

During the non-combat parts the HUD strips down to a bare minimum letting you soak in the epic architecture and the atmosphere.

Isn't she imperial guard, though? (i.e. just some random schmuck grabbed off a handy planet and conscripted)

Anyway, Dethtoll: applying the same constraints (i.e. giant tits or no) to "a computer game" and "plastic models about an inch high" is...not exactly fair.
You might as well say "holy shit a human in 40k without a fucking giant head and hands", because to make faces and digits recognizable on that scale they always have to exaggerate, and then the concept art for the next set of models tends to mimic the previous models -either for consistency or because that's what the concept artist was raised on- and so on. I mean, look at any dude in terminator armour: unless they have magical two-foot-wide armpits, there's no way they can put their arms into those suits. "Big tits" just falls into the same 'exaggerated physical characteristics' category as all the rest: need to make a model recognizably female? "Big hair and tits."

GW is fairly understated on the whole "men are giant hulking tanks, women are wearing bikinis" front: humans are pretty much all hulking tanks (male and female), eldar are all wearing sex armour (male and female), orks are..genderless, and so on. Hell, some of the chaos demons are hermaphrodites, so if it is sex-pandering, it's..weird sex pandering.

Generally 40K is far far less about sex than it is about killing fucktons of stuff in ludicrously impractical and unsustainable ways.

The real difference here appears to be that the game is attempting to actually make people reasonably proportioned all round: the protagonist looks like he has a human-sized head, for instance.

Out of curiosity, faetal: have you encountered any terminators yet, and if so: do they manage to make them look in any way feasible?

I played this a while ago and still fire it up on occasion for some Ork bashing.
DDL, it's a bit spoilerish, soooo no, there are no Terminators throughout the game. There IS a Titan, but unfortunately you don't get to smash things with it.

It has a very good weight to it overall, and while yeah it could learn a few tricks from Batman, it's still satisfying enough.

A pretty good story too. The protagonist is made reasonably interesting through his actions and the interactions with his squad members.

Like I was looking for artwork of Adeptas Sororitas and it took me 15 minutes to find one without tits you could sail around the world with.

The fact you actually spent 15 minutes on that is worrying in itself.

"It's research, mom!"

But like I said, models have to be recognizably female (hair and tits), subseqent concept art tends to mimic initial models, the cycle of exaggeration continues. Initial concept artwork is often more understated (unless you're looking at John Blanche concept art, coz he's crazy).

Plus, hey: it's armour. Inch thick armour plate adds a lot of volume.

Generally speaking, OTHER than the fact that they 'have tits', the adeptus sororitas get massive plus points on the "DDL arbitrary sex-pandering scale" for actually wearing armour. Big, fucking chunky armour.

Which would you rather wear into a gunfight?

This

or...say, this

Obviously that's a comedy extreme, but I could've used, say..miranda/liara/samara from mass effect.

So there's that.

Faetal: I can't be arsed to muck around in pshop and upload something, but here's the typical terminator outline:

And here's a generalised human outline

It's the shoulder width vs the position of the head, really. Even if you assume a particularly bulky human, there's just not enough space between the face and the arms to fit into that armour.

Just played a bit of the online coop with Jesh and some strangers. It's good fun, though voicechat doesn't seem to work and I'm not a huge fan of games that use Ranks. Luckily even the first few levels you unlock gave you some pretty sweet weapons tho, so it's no biggie.

But even aside from that, look at that fucking armor. It's terrible. It's not armor. It's a fucking pair of tin bowls welded together. That's just asking for a crushed sternum. If you punched the "boob shape" out so it actually, you know, directed weapons AWAY from her chest, you could still tell the wearer was female.

You know what's worrying about spending 15 minutes finding a non-ridiculous picture of the Sisters of Battle? That it took me FIFTEEN FUCKING MINUTES.

also you may want to reconsider the whole "gigantic breasts are vital to determining a woman's anatomy" argument 'cuz it's not doing you any favours

Faetal: I can't be arsed to muck around in pshop and upload something, but here's the typical terminator outline:

And here's a generalised human outline

It's the shoulder width vs the position of the head, really. Even if you assume a particularly bulky human, there's just not enough space between the face and the arms to fit into that armour.

I see what you mean. A human could just about fit in there, so long as you imagine that the armour is massive compared to the person inside. As in, 6 inches thick or similar. Either way, I think it is stylistic rather than practical. The face-in-mid-chest-framed-by-shoulders thing is probably just to make them look more aggressive, like someone with their head low, charging to battle, reminiscent of how a quadruped would appear (say, a bear) when charging towards you on all fours, just transposed to a biped to retain the human stature. I could be talking directly out of my glands here, but those are my off the cuff impressions.

The real problem is that the miniatures are just that: miniatures. Of course they're going to be exaggerated -- and, honestly, I think they're poorly designed regardless of gender. They're ugly and ridiculous-looking. But ultimately it doesn't matter because the actual tabletop game isn't all-important anymore. What does matter is the parts of the franchise more accessible to the people who don't store their figurines in their beards: the fluff novels and the artwork and other stuff. I don't want to feel embarrassed showing 40k to female friends because female characters are consistently portrayed with tits the size of a nuclear missile.

To be fair, the "figurines in the beard" thing was inspired by a story someone told me about how they'd gone to a GWS gathering to see if 40k was something they wanted to take up as a hobby, and was placed opposite this real winner that nobody wanted to be near who was moving from table to table and each time he moved, he'd scoop up his figurines and store them in his large beard -- some of them refusing to come out.

Jesus. I remember I briefly owned a 2000 point tyranid epic army when I was about 16. I really quite enjoyed the painting and the whole mythology behind the tyranids, but then they killed off epic and I realised that I had no taste for 40k.

I'd probably scream like a small girl if a kickstarter ever came up that proposed to make a TBS based on epic which included tyranids.

The thing about beards is very true, and we arent talking about ironic hipster beards either, full on throwback to the 70's rpg beardmen.
We are grown men playing with toy soldiers, but at least we look fucking MANLY.

Space Marine, in general, has good graphics, an engaging story, and interesting (if not particularly dynamic) characters. The level design is extreme corridor, and somewhat repetitive, but the gameplay is quite fun--except for online. Never mind the "let's make it even harder on the new folks than it already has to be" weapon unlocks, or the dodgy balance of some of the perks (Iron Halo being the major culprit, but not the only one)--the real problem is net lag.

The netcode is atrocious. Truly, truly miserable. I have played hundreds of games--have been gaming for over two dozen years--and I have never seen a game with anywhere near this much lag. There is, literally, about five times more lag in Space Marine than in any other game I've played. Playing with the same people with whom I have only 150 ping in other games, I have a full 750 ping's worth of lag in SM.

Yep, we're talking about an average lag of half a second or more, and that's when you aren't fighting the Russians. Got an Australian friend on? We're looking at a full second of lag. Jump behind that cover, but it won't matter, because you'll be killed a second after you're in safety by his bullets which are flying past outside. Dodge that chainsword, but it won't matter because you'll take damage even though it missed you by a full fifteen feet. (Actually, I was often killed by a hammer which never came closer to me than thirty feet away.)

Throw in a horrid interface which doesn't allow you to choose which server to join, doesn't allow you to kick players from games that you host, has no chatlog and no way of seeing what the server options are, and makes you mute every VOIP screamer by hand (VOIP is on by default, with no volume slider, no "mute all" function, and--worse--no way of muting someone unless they are actively talking at that moment), and you have a game which has good graphics, gameplay, and story, but is ultimately not worth playing online.

Would I have bought Space Marine if I'd known it was going to be like that? Probably not. I enjoyed the single player, and I even enjoyed the multiplayer for a few weeks--I griped about the issues, but the novelty of the game (combined with the game's positive aspects) balanced it out for a while. But when the novelty dies down, the negative outweighs the good. +5 novelty +5 gameplay -7 shitty netcode = net +3. Nix the novelty factor: +5 gameplay -7 shitty netcode = net -2. The occasional moments of multiplayer fun aren't worth the hours of teeth-grinding stress of the laggy bullshit.

I don't want to feel embarrassed showing 40k to female friends because female characters are consistently portrayed with tits the size of a nuclear missile.

I think your assumption that any woman will look at the entirety of the 40K range (featuring, after all, 10 or more wholly discrete 'races', only three of them human/former human) and dismiss the entire thing out of hand because "ugh, look at those tits"...is about the most sexist thing I've read in this thread thus far. Is that really how you think women think? Or do you just have ...embarassingly shallow female friends?

In all honesty, I don't think 'portray women as sex objects' ever really features on the GW agenda. It's based on table-top wargaming, after all. You can dismiss that aspect as not being 'all important anymore', but it's still the fundamental underpinning of the entire enterprise.
Male figures are hard-bitten horrible giant hulking dudes who murder people, female figures are hard-bitten horrible giant hulking dudes (with tits) who murder people. Gender is fairly irrelevant. Very little "roll 2D6 to launch a pickup line". The Adeptus sororitas are essentially 'Combat Nuns', ffs. Unless you're accusing GW of having a fairly specific fetish, they're about the most sexless archetype for an all-female organisation they could pick.

From the (admittedly few) spin-off books I've read (in my defense, I wanted easily-digestible pulp for a long plane flight), this theme continues: no sex, or even romance, it's just straight up murder murder murder.

Given how hilariously bleak the 40K universe is, I'm amazed anyone ever even gets around to having sex at all (and even then they probably get set on fire by an inquistor for "having fun").

EDIT: Fafhrd, that is an awesome link. I like the idea of unarmoured space marines looking less like supermen and more like awkward slabs of meat. I'd still guess that terminator armour is impractical (even the basic power armour looks to be awful tight around the armpit), but that sort of physiology makes it a lot more plausible.